Citation patterns in educational research

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate citation structures in educational research; and also, to study the visibility of European educational research. Bibliometric analyses are performed on data from Web of Science, the EERQI Content Base and Google Scholar, investigating both characteristics of publications through frequencies and distributions, as well as citation structures through cocitation analyses. The results show fragmented citation patterns presenting little opportunity to detect robust evidence of visibility or impact of contemporary educational research on any level of aggregation other than field level. This should be interpreted considering the diverse nature of educational research, and an organization of the field that differs from a strong norm, not the least in research evaluation programs, of research essentially being a cumulative process.